8/9/07

The Millon Dollar Wiki is a recently unveiled website, done by a University of Connecticut student. The student cites his basis for starting the site as needing a way to pay for student loans and also wanting to open a bar up in Boston, Mass someday. So he started up the Million Dollar Wiki to reach his goals. So far so good.

The basis of the Million Dollar Wiki is that people/businesses can pay $100 to own their own page on the site. The page is guaranteed for 15 years minimum. The page can be done about any topic you choose and can serve as a way to promote your own business or cause. Makes sense for its promotional "buzz" value. Things like this can get media attention and actually great Search engine rankings, which in turn could help your business do very well, especially if the creator of the site starts to appear on web and TV interviews. Of course, paying the $100 bill to do this, isn't the best plan for everyone. This one could be a good idea for someone who makes some extra cash online and then wants to re-invest it into further promotion/publicity for their business or site. Worth checking out, to give an idea how some creative minds on the internet find ways to make that money.

Here's the top 5 most popular pages on the Wikipedia, as of this entry:

The student who dreamed this up has already sold 220 or so pages, giving him over $22,000. Not a bad start, he's aiming for 1,000 pages sold, or $1 million. While this isn't an example of a free way to make money, it shows the notion of "Virtual Real Estate" which is one way people cash in online. They build a site/page which then sells advertising space of some sort to people at a cheap cost, $100 or less. There's been sites which have sold small "pixels" of space to promote at $1 or so, totaling 1 million in sales. The sites tend to get media coverage and buzz and hit their goal thanks to all the attention as the site builds in momentum.